State of 8.2.0, July 12, 2008

[Michael Stone]

Dear world,

Here's a brief overview of the status of the 8.2.0 release process. (Notes: I
apologize in advance that I was not able to make this overview more succinct or
better organized. I hope that these issues will resolve themselves as we come
to share a greater understanding of the actual state of the release.)

Michael

=== Procedural Notices:

Dennis recently made us an 8.2 release build stream. For the time being, you're
all doing a great job providing good fixes, so Dennis will automatically merge
changes from joyride into the 8.2 stream as soon as he sees a positive report
about the changes. Please leave us messages in Trac, then poke us if you need
to attract our attention to your change. (In a couple of weeks, we'll start
being more selective about which changes we include [at which time this
communication will become more important.)

Joe really needs nice package-level changelogs in order to quickly figure out
exactly which individual issues he's supposed to be testing in a given build.
I'm sure he'll give us some hints soon about what he wants to see; in the
meantime, please put some extra effort into writing informative changelog
entries that will be useful for QA (and for me). (I'm looking at you, kernel
team!)

=== Bugs you should watching or trying to fix:

(See the end for the key to the status codes.)

5104, 5527     DBG   ???         Reconnecting to encrypted access points with NM
                                 \ http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-July/016335.html
7474           DBG   sayamindu   Amharic compose key broken
7480           DSN   ???         Networking configuration reset button
7458           DBG   dsaxena     Suspend/Resume (S/R) lockups
many           TST   dilinger    Touchpad bugs.
                                 \ http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-May/013580.html
7095           OWN   ???         Library bundle installation
7353           DBG   dgilmore    F-9 Bloat
???            TST   ???         OFW refresh
7392           TST   martin_xsa  DS backup/restore
7384, 7434     TST   cjb         Power management (PM) control panel entry (CPE).
4951, 7396     TST   cscott      Activity Updater CPE.
6797           PKG   ???         Rainbox/X race

=== General issues:

Keymap retesting:
  - we need to systematically check all our keymaps; in particular,
    en_US, am_ET, es_PR, es_UY, pt_BR, ht_HT, and ???

Sugar slowness & redraws
  - Sugar feels really slow both because it is and because we're seeing lots of
    intermediate states (redraws, overlapping icons, ...)
  - what else is going on besides the rainbow/X race?

Telepathy-based collaboration:
  - some change were made to the Telepathy CMs and to the PS. 
    what effect, if any, did they have?
  - which, if any, collaboration scenarios can be relied on today?
  - what's the actual state of Gadget?

=== Random questions:

lease delegation:
  - is the initramfs correctly checking the contents of the leases file for v2
    leases?

Walter + Peru security:
  - what did Walter want to tell us?

Trac additions
  - we want to add a 'review' option to the 'action needed' field.
  - anything else?

7466           DSN   ???         tamtam symlinks.
                                 \ seems like this should be fixed in TamTam;
                                   not pilgrim.

7448           TST   cscott      updates from 656 to joyride fail.
                                 \ ick

7442           DBG   ???         weird interactions between X and VTs.
                                 \ are these interactions dangerous?

=== Status Codes

Key: ??? - status or author unknown
     TST - needs to be tested in a build
     BLD - needs to be put into a build
     PKG - pkg needs to be built
     DBG - debugging/diagnosis still needed
     DSN - design needed
     STK - stuck; a decision is needed about how to proceed
     SGN - a signoff is needed
     ESC - canceled or siginificantly reduced in priority
     FIN - successfully finished
     MSG - communication needed
     ROT - solution has bitrotted
     OWN - owner needed

=== Currently useful links

http://dev.laptop.org/~bert/8.2-joyride.html
   - Bert, could you please make a version of your status pages which shows
     package changelog entries? Thanks in advance!

http://dev.laptop.org/report/21
   - Fixed-timespan report on changes to 8.2.0 bugs.

http://dev.laptop.org/report/20?TIME=400000;page=1;
   - Adjustable-timespan report on changes to 8.2.0 bugs.

http://pilgrim.laptop.org/~pilgrim/xo-1/streams/8.2/
   - 8.2.0 build stream

http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/xo-1/streams/joyride/
   - Joyride build stream

=== Things that m_stone is falling down on:

- making sure that the localization team is happy
- containing the enthusiasm of certain 1cc-based developers to include new
  features like activity-updates and lease delegation
- figuring out what the actual release blockers are
- keeping up with Gregorio's writings
- getting reliable numbers about the present state of our collaboration use
  cases.
- writing regular status updates.